Back in the utter confusion of grade school, they taught us this wonderfully polite acronym for the order of mathematical operations: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. I loved calling it PEMDAS, which sounds like some kind of indigestion medicine, although it really stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. A polite acronym for a sometimes ruthless belief in the order and ideality of math.
And it is with firm politeness that I beg you, gracious audience: Please Excuse The Following Column About Politics. PETFCAP. And Please Excuse This Horrible Acronym. Because I didn’t plan it out.
But maybe it’s better that way. I think people do all too much planning in politics — that is, planning every word they will say. And after all that planning, they don’t say what they really mean! I plan to break both these rules as best I can.
If I were in the White House, this would be rather unacceptable: for not only have I not planned my politics, I plan to say what I mean. Even though I don’t know what I mean. (And certainly not what I’ll say.) This, actually, is the point of my foray: I’d like to see if anyone in politics is saying what I think they mean.
And what a great week to explore this topic! The week that the man Ahmadinejad came. For no one but Allah him or herself knows what Ahmadinejad really means, or what he is really thinking. Does he really want to nuke Israel? Or is he just a cute, smiley, polite professor? And his façade makes all the difference. It makes him a good politician, and makes total fools out of all who pretend they know what he’ll do.
But let’s start with the president of the new Hottest Ivy — Columbia University. Hottest “for fulfilling the burning desire of Ivies everywhere to matter in the world, by having done some controversial shit,” Newsweek might have reported. If I were writing. Now I re-introduce that interviewer, Jeremy. I do not know this guy, but man, he looks good.
Jeremy: So, President Bollinger, Your Hotness, I must commend you for your impassioned speech on Monday.
Bollinger: Thank you, Jeremy. I’m not sure why I’m talking to you, because I’m a pretty big deal. I just defended the modern civilized world against evil on Monday. It’s tiring, you know?
J: Yes sir, well thanks for taking time out to hypothetically dialogue with me. Now, do you think you were impolite to Dr. Ahmadinejad by calling him a cruel and petty tyrant?
B: I think I was firm. This man is challenging rather basic things, things that are dear to us: the West, for one, the veracity of the Holocaust … he must be responded to firmly.
J: Do you think politeness really matters?
B: I’ve learned since Monday that it does to most people. The Iranians are very offended that I called Ahmadinejad names. I think they know the regime is a bit cruel … but petty. You don’t call a tyrant petty. No tyrant wants to be petty. I think I learned that.
J: But do you think Ahmadinejad is just playing games with the West? After you said that about him, he made you look silly by speaking about respect. He said they would never treat Bush like that in Iran. They sound pretty moralistic over there — as if diplomatic respect is what matters, and if only we had kissed him exactly six times, they wouldn’t even mind the tighter sanctions on Iran that Congress voted for the next day.
B: Well, does it make much difference if respect is shown in person or not? They burn our flag and call us Satan and think we don’t hear it … but we’ve heard that loud and clear. It’s not very respectful. It’s anti-Western.
J: But don’t some people at Columbia think that the West is pretty screwed up too? I mean, not flag-burning, but pointing out serious mistakes. Like the late Edward Said. He said the West has developed as a nasty reflection of the East it was colonizing. He put a capital “O” in the word Other and said the West Othered the East, and treated the Arabs as lazy, but sexualized objects to be studied as if they were below the West. And his writing had lots of capitals, and most of the Columbian Middle Eastern Studies department agreed: the West is, indeed, not so great. He didn’t even need an acronym! Just “Other!”
B: We have a plurality of viewpoints. That’s what the university is all about. Edward was admired by all of us for his revolutionary ideas.
J: But you fundamentally disagree with Professor Said if you assume that the West is the only place that is civilized. Said would remind you that America’s relations with the Arabs … before it, Europe’s relations with the Jews …and with the Arabs … have been remarkably uncivil! Ahmadinejad’s government would look a lot different were it not for the oppressive, uncivilized regime of the Shah that drove Iran to Islamic theocracy! The American-supported Shah with the SAVAK, the secret police. That was the West they saw. Uncivilized. And now they see Iraq. Democracy for the Arab today is blood, even if over here it is iPods. They taught me at the other C.U. that liberalism means agreeing to disagree; but can you agree to disagree with Professor Said on all this? If you agree to disagree about the West itself — whether its modernity is truly the answer — then you won’t have such a monolithic “modern, civilized world” to defend.
B: And that, my friend, is the paradox of the American university.
Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com [1]. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.
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[1] mailto:jsiegman@cornellsun.com